Move Only in Dimly Lit Halls
by PharaonicWolf
Summary: M acquires the boy who will be Q. Prequel to my multi-chaptered Skyfall fic "All the Kids Have Always Known," but can be read as a stand-alone story.


**Author's notes:**

This is one of those fics that get written feverishly all in one day because you just have so many FEELS about the characters and desperately need to spit it all out. Mostly I wanted to write M because JUDI DENCH, WE ARE NOT WORTHY and, as much as I love writing _Skyfall_ sequels, I miss her terribly (and the characters do too!).

* * *

What's my name, what's my station, oh just tell me what I should do  
I don't need to be kind to the armies of night that would do such injustice to you  
Or bow down and be grateful and say "Sure, take all that you see"  
To the men who move only in dimly lit halls and determine my future for me

- Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues"

* * *

Over the years the steel-barred cells in the base level of MI6 had contained terrorists of all stripes, traitors to the nation, the world's most brilliant minds bent inexorably, like dowsing rods, towards destruction. The most recent acquisition could, in M's opinion, have all of these descriptors attached to him – but she was about to make a gamble on the word _inexorably_.

His security feed had been up in the corner of her computer screen all morning. They had denied him everything he asked for – his own clothes back, pen and paper, a phone call, a lawyer – so for hours he had sat quietly at the table, cuffed hands between his knees, alternating between long periods of vacancy (though M was sure his brain was always working) and deliberate, unnerving scans of the room. He knew that there were people watching him on the other side of the mirrored wall, and at one point he had rested the side of his head on the table, glasses slightly askew, and stared, as though he could see through his own image to the guard and the psychologist behind.

When M went into Q branch to congratulate the security team, she found them all clustered in the monitoring room, examining their catch from every angle with the mixture of pride and disdain she would expect from a scientist who cloned a dinosaur and wound up disappointed by its predictable behavior.

"He's twenty-_what_? Looks eighteen."

"He needs a haircut."

"He's a uni kid, they all need haircuts."

"He's so pale. Probably never seen the light of day."

"Probably never seen a naked woman, either."

They were all too euphoric from the culmination of several months' work to look properly abashed when M cleared her throat. She scolded them with one raised eyebrow and decided not to hold it against them.

"You have done some truly excellent work for your country," she said, as images of the hacker in his Cambridge sweatshirt and thick-framed glasses flashed across one of the top screens. "You may expect a healthy bonus on your paycheck and catering in the break room Monday morning. Now I suggest you get back to your excellent work and leave my office to do its job."

She purposefully positioned herself in the doorway so they would have to walk past one by one and she could look them each in the eye with a small nod of praise. Holly waited until the end, so the others would not overhear.

"He's a _kid_, M," she whispered. Her eyes and voice were steady, but a flush had crept over her face. Holly had two small children at home.

M had already made her plans. "We'll take care of it."

He had been dozing right before M walked in, head slumped on his chest. When he peered up through his fringe and saw who his visitor was, he snapped to full alertness with a speed that impressed M in spite of herself.

She took her time getting settled in the opposite chair – smoothed her skirt, sipped her coffee, swept her eyes over his orange jumpsuit and rumpled hair. The security team was right – he needed a haircut, and a shower, and a shave.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked, after the appropriate period of silence.

"The person in charge," he responded, voice quiet, carefully modulated, a little raspy from disuse and dehydration. They had not given him anything to eat or drink since his arrest almost eighteen hours ago.

She nodded once. "Do you know why I'm here?"

His eyes narrowed just the smallest amount, just the tiniest tension in the eyelids. Calculation and defiance, propped up by forced bravado. His inflection did not change. "To look me in the face. To ask me how I did it, and why. To tell me about all of the things you're going to do to me that you're not allowed to do but I know from reading your files that you do anyway."

This time she shook her head, with an indulgent but unaffectionate smile. "Wrong on all counts."

He couldn't hide his surprise, and for an instant she could clearly see him on campus in his sweatshirt, discovering all the things one discovers in one's early twenties: first responsibilities, first recreational drugs, first time instructors become peers, first deep, adult love.

"I have enough images and video that I can look you in the face all day long, if I so choose," she explained. "My security team knows how you did almost everything you did, and I don't really care about the why. And my preferred options for your future are entirely legal."

He blinked, once, twice, three times.

"The Attorney General is chomping at the bit to put you on trial; I'm sure your sentence will be as stiff as possible, as a warning to those who would follow in your footsteps. The United States and Germany are also requesting that you be extradited to face charges in their courts. With any of these options, it will be a drawn-out process, and you will sit in a cell for its entirety, because you will not be granted bail."

None of this altered his composure, but she didn't expect it to. She had seen the footage of his first three hours in custody, and she could pinpoint the exact moment when he resigned himself to imprisonment: two hours and thirty-eight minutes in, when he finally stopped pacing the same three feet of floor (they had attached his ankle to the table with a short chain, so he could not tamper with the cameras in the corners of the room) and sat down slowly, as though the chair were electric. She wouldn't frighten him with the court systems of the free world.

"Or –" A careful pause. "– you could answer to the Chinese government for your crimes against _them_; they make quite a compelling case." She drew a manila folder from her bag and flicked it open, angling it so he couldn't see the contents; he leaned sideways, trying to see around the edge, then caught himself and sat back. She turned a page and feigned pleasant surprise. "I could also hand you over to the Colombians. They would make sure, one way or another, that we never hear from you again."

The bravado vanished; he was still defiant, not quite taken in, but she had fertilized the little seed of wariness buried in his mind. Before this he had never been arrested or ticketed for anything, not even improper parking.

"So." She closed the folder, put it in her lap, and folded her arms on the table, leaning close and looking at him as though he were a rich morsel of food, rare and relished and easily consumed. "Twenty-three years old, and I get to choose which prison you will rot in for the rest of your life."

_That_ got a twitch out of him. He tossed his head like a horse flicking away flies to try to cover it up, but she had seen his shoulders jerk, his throat convulse as though he might retch.

"Our records have turned up exactly one living relative, an aunt, who has very little contact with you and does not contribute in any way to your education. Interviews with your professors and classmates indicate a limited social life: no girlfriend – or boyfriend, few acquaintances, no apparent desire for closeness with anyone. You live alone because you had a row with your former flatmate almost three years ago and have not spoken to him since." She caught a grudging respect behind the glare of his glasses; he knew they had the capability, but he had not really expected her to know all of this.

She let a beat pass for emphasis. "The world will not miss you."

Then she made a production out of leaving. She drained her coffee – the tip of his tongue slipped out to moisten his lips and he watched the mug greedily – tapped the papers straight in the folder, rifled through her bag to ensure his folder was replaced in exactly the right spot. He had already given up on her, already turned his head away to stare again at the observation mirror, when she threw out the last piece of her plan as casually as she might throw a dog a biscuit.

"Or I could offer you a job."

His head swung back to her in a blink and she could tell that he was furious with himself for reacting so obviously. But curiosity overrode, accompanied by suspicion.

She would not give up any details until he asked for them, and she would give him a precise window of time in which to do so. Silently she counted off the seconds and watched his eyes dart back and forth as though he were reading text etched into the table.

When she reached fifteen, he swallowed hard, as if his pride were a physical lump in his throat, and said, "You want me to make sure no one else can do what I did."

"More than that."

"You want me to catch hackers for you, then." He glared at her; it was the first time he had glared at anyone, shown anger that wasn't safeguarded by contempt, since her people had come to the door of his flat. "Send other people to prison in my place."

"I want to give your considerable talent a focus," she – not _snapped_, precisely, but stated with more force than necessary. He had unwittingly poked something sensitive. Maybe she wasn't being fair; they had caught gifted hackers before, and she had offered none of them jobs. Maybe he had gotten to something long-buried inside of her that responded to his moppet hair and schoolboy clothes, his loneliness and calculation, his shortsighted and touching belief that justice existed and he could be its arbiter. He had exposed a double-oh in Algeria, but he had also brought down a terrorist cell in Lebanon; he had committed massive securities fraud and donated more than half the money to charities combating AIDS and malaria. Right now he was a blunt instrument, unsure how best to wield himself, but he had the makings of a handsome weapon, precise and responsive and just as deadly as any of her agents in the field.

"I want," she continued with more composure, "you to solve puzzles for us. I want you to design things no one else on our technology staff can imagine. If you go to prison I will make sure you never touch a computer again; if you come work for us, you'll have access to toys you've only dreamed existed. You can let boredom make you a shell, or –" Her lips quirked as she imagined his response to her next words. "– you can sell us a piece of your soul and earn the resources to keep the rest of your self intact – or, dare I say, improved."

He smirked at the table. "A devil's bargain."

She gave him her first genuine smile of the day. "I'm sure you can reconcile it with your conscience."

One of his hands worked at the cuff on the opposite wrist, but without purpose. He looked tired. He had been chained to the table for this eighteen hours and slept only in snatches. She gathered her bag and stood.

"Think on it. I'll give you a day."

The guard had opened the door and she had taken a step through it before he spoke up. "I'll do it."

She stepped back into the room but did not come back to the table. He would not look at her; his head had bowed further, but she could just see his eyelashes sweeping against his glasses every time he blinked.

Nothing like this had happened in M's tenure, but she had thought for a long time about how it could be arranged. "This deal will be known only within the Secret Intelligence Service. We will protect you from anyone who wishes to prosecute you or order up your head on a platter. We will give you access to our networks and our equipment. In return, you will submit to any restrictions we place on your behavior until you have proven your commitment to MI6. You will wear a monitoring device at all times. You will move into a flat that we will provide, and you will be escorted to and from work every day. We will continue to monitor your mobile phone and your personal computers."

In the silence he took a deep breath, held it for a moment, let it out. His shoulders quivered, so small she could barely see it. _Someday_, M thought, _you'll understand my mercy_.

"From now on, if I say 'jump,' you ask how high and how far."

She waited. She had to hear him say it.

It took a while, but finally he licked his lips and cleared his throat. "Yes, ma'am."

"You start on Monday." This time she didn't wait for his reaction. That gave her less than four days to sort everything out with the Intelligence and Security Committee Chairman, but she had made greater things happen in shorter amounts of time.

On her way out she stopped in the observation room to speak to the psychologist she had assigned to profile him. Both of them watched the window as they talked. As soon as she left he had dropped his forehead gently against the table and sat there, slumped and trembling, and she discovered a reluctance to watch him work through his guilt and fear and second thoughts. But then he lifted his head and looked directly at her, through his hair, through his glasses, through the mirror, and even through all those layers she could see his stubbornness and resilience and she knew he would be all right.

Back in her office, she pressed a button on the intercom, and Q's voice responded immediately: "Ma'am?"

"Come up here," she ordered. "I've got you a present, and we need to talk."


End file.
